The present invention relates to network monitoring and management systems, and more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, system, and storage medium for collecting SNMP bandwidth data for a network device.
Many businesses today are transferring their network management activities to third parties, such as backbone providers, who are better skilled to build and maintain complex network configurations. Such activities include web hosting, VPN access, and other data transport activities, to name a few. These third parties often rely on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to track and monitor the network devices they host. SNMP is used to collect statistics from various types of network equipment. SNMP governs network management and the monitoring of network devices and their functions by sending messages to different parts of a network. SNMP-compliant devices, called agents, store data about themselves in Management Information Bases (MIBs) and return this data to the SNMP requesters. SNMP is based on user datagram protocol (UDP), which is an inherently unreliable protocol. As a result, current systems have not been capable of guaranteeing the capture of all data samples. Despite the use of timeouts and retransmissions, SNMP request and response packets are not guaranteed to arrive at their destination.
Backbone service providers require high quality data sampling of network devices in order to generate accurate bandwidth billing for these electronic business services. Raw data tracked from network devices is often inaccurate or incomplete. Consequently, these providers often lose a significant amount of their billing revenue.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to comprehensively track the SNMP data received from network devices.